When IoT Devices and Solutions Get Left Behind – Connected World

“This is a brave new world. Those who are brave need to be diligent and willing to methodically inventory and discard vulnerable equipment. Treat them like blighted limbs on a tree and prune them.” – Sanjay Sarma, MIT

“We decided to use this to our advantage and really put the technology to the test and let the market evaluate if it was worth investing in or not,” Börjesson explains. “The test came out positive, and, today, the entire team is feeling a strong sense of ownership but still hangs on to the sensible approach of always asking ourselves: Are we building products that the customer needs? And the answer should always be ‘yes.’”

Börjesson points out a couple of practical reasons a technology may be left behind by its original inventor, including a lack of time or resources to bring the technology to market properly or a poor market fit at a particular place or moment in time. “In my opinion, neither of these reflect the potential of the technology itself, as it could just be a case of bad timing,” he says.

Like Young, Börjesson highlights the benefits of open source in addressing abandoned technology. “In this day and age, where the will and power of the larger community is so strong, I believe it would be a brilliant opportunity, both for the original owners and the users, to make the software/hardware available as open source,” he says. “A popular application that no longer receives support from its owners could easily be developed further by its community of users if the source code is made available at GitHub or similar and actually become a better application—as no one knows better what the users want than the users themselves.”